Artificial Intelligence

Sep 4, 2026

AI Newsletter: You probably don’t want to fine-tune

You’re usually better off doing plain old prompt engineering

The vitals hex sticker, a teddy bear in surgical scrubs holding a stethoscope, on a dark green gradient scattered with faint dots that drift upward to the right like a positively correlated scatterplot.

Sep 3, 2026

vitals 0.4.0

vitals 0.4.0, a package for LLM evaluation in R, is now on CRAN

Aug 17, 2026

Neural networks in Orbital for Python 0.6.0: PyTorch straight to your database

Orbital 0.6.0 adds neural network support: PyTorch and scikit-learn MLPs compile to plain SQL, no Python runtime required at inference

Alessandro Molina

Aug 14, 2026

AI Newsletter: How to choose a model

Which model is ‘best’? A survey of the current model landscape

Aug 13, 2026

Positron August Release Highlights

Highlights from the 2026.08 release of Positron, including new SQL features, a better reproducible authoring experience, improved handling of missing packages, and more

Aug 10, 2026

Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 are now in Posit AI

A new batch of open weights models in Posit AI show impressive capabilities at a fraction of the price

Jul 31, 2026

AI Newsletter: EDA log in Posit Assistant

A higher-level view of your data analysis conversations

Jul 17, 2026

AI Newsletter: LLMs often miss subtle visual artifacts in data visualizations

Introducing bluffbench2, a new data science LLM evaluation

Jul 15, 2026

Tips for managing your Python & R environments in Positron

Tips and features for managing Python and R environments in Positron, including interpreter discovery, the Packages Pane, project templates, and Posit Assistant

Cindy Tong, Brice Stacey

Jul 13, 2026

Positron July Release Highlights

Highlights from the 2026.07 release of Positron, including the new Notebook editor, Packages pane, and Posit Assistant all reaching general availability

The package hex sticker, showing a monkey hanging from a wooden bridge with a jungle background. Behind the hex sticker is a subtle yellow-to-green gradient.

Jul 6, 2026

mcptools 1.0.0

The first major release of mcptools, an R SDK for the Model Context Protocol, is now on CRAN

Jul 3, 2026

AI Newsletter: AGENTS.md vs Skills vs MCP servers

How to decide between the many ways of customizing agent behavior, plus Posit Assistant and package updates

Rich Iannone, Tomasz Kalinowski

Jul 1, 2026

raghilda v0.2: crawl APIs, PostgreSQL, and more

raghilda v0.2 introduces a crawl and ingest API with caching and concurrency, a CloudflareCrawler for JavaScript-rendered sites, a PostgreSQL store backend, and NVIDIA NIM embeddings

Jun 22, 2026

Introducing debrief: profiling summaries for AI agents

debrief turns profvis profiling output into text-based summaries: hotspots, call trees, source context, and memory allocations, readable in the terminal and consumable by AI agents

Emil Hvitfeldt

Jun 19, 2026

AI Newsletter: LLMs are getting much better at interpreting counterintuitive plots

Model releases from the last couple months have shown a large jump in capability on our bluffbench eval, which measures agents’ ability to faithfully describe plots showing surprising results

A querychat app showing a natural language conversation with inline ggsql visualizations and SQL query results

Jun 17, 2026

Ask more of your dashboard with querychat and ggsql

querychat now supports ggsql-powered visualizations — users can ask “show me” questions and get charts rendered directly in the chat, alongside SQL queries and reactive filtering, all without arbitrary code execution

Carson Sievert

Three logos representing the three Posit agents, connected left to right by dotted lines: a robot face wearing goggles (Positron Assistant), a cylinder wearing goggles (Databot), and a four-pointed star inside two diamonds (Posit Assistant), suggesting a progression from one data science agent to the next.

Jun 11, 2026

A brief and biased history of Posit data science agents

What we learned from Positron Assistant and Databot

Joe Cheng

Jun 8, 2026

Positron June Release Highlights

Highlights from the 2026.06 release of Positron, including faster startup and migrating to Posit Assistant

Jun 8, 2026

Posit Assistant is specialized for data work

What distinguishes Posit Assistant from general-purpose agents like Claude Code for data work

Sara Altman

May 22, 2026

AI Newsletter: Gemma 4 in Posit Assistant

The latest AI Newsletter, including the increasing costs of LLMs and Gemma 4 as a budget-focused model in Posit Assistant

May 11, 2026

Positron May Release Highlights

Highlights from the 2026.05 release of Positron, including a new Packages pane and inline output for Quarto

May 8, 2026

AI Newsletter: A Data Cleaning Mode for Posit Assistant

The latest AI Newsletter, including a new data analysis feature for Posit Assistant and an open-source release supporting pre-trained models for tabular data

May 5, 2026

A Plotnine Skill for AI Coding Agents

An installable skill that helps coding Agents produce consistent, runnable plotnine code. It is usable from any Agent that supports the Agent Skills standard

Hassan Kibirige

Apr 24, 2026

2026-04-24 AI Newsletter

The latest AI newsletter, covering AI cybersecurity efforts, improvements in local models, and a grammar of graphics for SQL

Daniel Falbel, Tomasz Kalinowski

raghilda hex sticker featuring a cartoon Viking girl with a braided red hair and horned helmet, holding an axe, surrounded by scattered documents

Apr 14, 2026

RAG with raghilda

An introduction to building retrieval-augmented generation systems with raghilda

Jan 27, 2026

ragnar 0.3.0

The new release of ragnar adds faster ingestion, new embedding providers, improved retrieval, and new integrations for using ragnar stores from tools

Tomasz Kalinowski

Nov 18, 2025

ellmer 0.4.0

ellmer 0.4.0 includes important lifecycle updates, new Claude features (caching, file uploads, web tools), OpenAI improvements, and enhancements to error handling, pricing tracking, and security

Hadley Wickham

Aug 20, 2025

ragnar 0.2

ragnar 0.2 introduces a tidy, transparent toolkit for building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines in R

Tomasz Kalinowski

Aug 19, 2025

mall 0.2.0

The mall 0.2.0 update for R and Python introduces support for external LLM providers like OpenAI and Gemini. This version also features parallel processing for R users, the ability to run NLP on string vectors in Python, and a brand new cheatsheet

Edgar Ruiz

Jul 25, 2025

ellmer 0.3.0

The newest version of ellmer introduces a simpler chat() interface that can works with any provider, a bunch of improvements to tool calling, and a handful of smaller quality of life improvements

Hadley Wickham

Jul 21, 2025

R and the Model Context Protocol

The newly released mcptools package makes coding assistants better at writing R code and applications built with ellmer more powerful

Introducing vitals, a toolkit for evaluating LLM products in R

Jun 27, 2025

Introducing vitals, a toolkit for evaluating LLM products in R

The first release of vitals, a package for large language model evaluation in R, just made it to CRAN

May 28, 2025

ellmer 0.2.0

ellmer 0.2.0 lands with a swag of upgrades: Garrick Aden‑Buie joins the team, we make a couple of breaking changes, and add serious scale with parallel_chat() and batch_chat(). A new params() helper standardises model settings across providers and chats now report how much they cost. The release also tidies chat_* names, bumps default models and adds Hugging Face, Mistral AI, and Portkey connectors

Hadley Wickham

Three experiments in LLM code assist with RStudio and Positron

Jan 29, 2025

Three experiments in LLM code assist with RStudio and Positron

We’ve been experimenting with LLM-powered tools to streamline R data science and package development

Oct 30, 2024

Introducing mall for R…and Python

We are proud to introduce the {mall} package. With {mall}, you can use a local LLM to run NLP operations across a data frame. (sentiment, summarization, translation, etc). {mall} has been simultaneously released to CRAN and PyPi (as an extension to Polars)

Edgar Ruiz

Apr 4, 2024

Chat with AI in RStudio

Interact with Github Copilot and OpenAI’s GPT (ChatGPT) models directly in RStudio. The chattr Shiny add-in makes it easy for you to interact with these and other Large Language Models (LLMs)

Edgar Ruiz

What are Large Language Models? What are they not?

Jun 20, 2023

What are Large Language Models? What are they not?

This is a high-level, introductory article about Large Language Models (LLMs), the core technology that enables the much-en-vogue chatbots as well as other Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. It is directed at a general audience, possibly with some technical and/or scientific background, but no knowledge is assumed of either deep learning or NLP. Having looked at major model ingredients, training workflow, and mechanics of output generation, we also talk about what these models are not

Sigrid Keydana

Jun 20, 2023

GPT-2 from scratch with torch

Implementing a language model from scratch is, arguably, the best way to develop an accurate idea of how its engine works. Here, we use torch to code GPT-2, the immediate successor to the original GPT. In the end, you’ll dispose of an R-native model that can make direct use of Hugging Face’s pre-trained GPT-2 model weights

Sigrid Keydana

May 25, 2023

LLaMA in R with Keras and TensorFlow

Implementation and walk-through of LLaMA, a Large Language Model, in R, with TensorFlow and Keras

Tomasz Kalinowski